Fanny Cochrane Smith

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In 1899, a 65-year-old woman stood before a strange device—a wax-cylinder phonograph—and spoke into its metal horn:

“I’m Fanny Smith. I was born on Flinders Island. I’m the last of the Tasmanians.”

Then she began to sing in a language no one else alive could speak.

Fanny Cochrane Smith was born in 1834 at Wybalenna on Flinders Island—not into freedom, but into what the British called an “Aboriginal Establishment.” In reality, it was a concentration camp.

Her mother, Tanganutura, belonged to the Cape Portland people of northeastern Tasmania. Before European invasion in 1803, between two and eight thousand Palawa people lived across the island. By the 1830s, disease, shootings, forced removals, and systematic violence—now known as the Black War—had reduced that population to roughly two hundred survivors.

In 1833, George Augustus Robinson persuaded those survivors to surrender, promising safety. Instead, they were exiled to Wybalenna—a windswept island settlement where people died in shocking numbers from illness, hunger, despair, and neglect.

Into this place, Fanny was born. She was the first child born at Wybalenna. That gave her a tragic distinction: as a child, she learned songs, words, and stories from survivors of many Tasmanian language groups—the last people who still remembered them.

She was gathering fragments of a disappearing world before she could understand what loss meant.

At five years old, Fanny was taken from her parents and placed in the care of Robert Clark, the settlement’s catechist. His wife gave her the surname “Cochrane,” as though renaming her could erase her origins.

What followed was cruelty. A later inquiry found that Clark had “on several occasions chained and flogged Fanny Cochrane.” She was a child. The man tasked with her spiritual instruction was torturing her.

Another Aboriginal girl, Mathinna, suffered similar abuse under Clark until Lady Jane Franklin removed her by adoption. Mathinna’s life ended young as well—another victim of colonial destruction.

Wybalenna closed in 1847. Survivors were transferred to Oyster Cove, south of Hobart. Two years later, Fanny’s father, Nicermenic, died there. She was fifteen.

By twenty, Fanny married William Smith, an English transportee convicted of theft who worked as a sawyer. From then on, she was known as Fanny Cochrane Smith.

Together, they built an outwardly ordinary life. They ran a boarding house in Hobart, then moved to Nicholls Rivulet near Oyster Cove. The government granted Fanny land—first 100 acres, later expanded to 300 in 1889—as compensation for her Aboriginal status.

They raised eleven children. Fanny split roofing shingles by hand. She carried them herself. She walked fifty kilometers to Hobart for supplies. She grew food, fed others, and became known for generosity, hospitality, and a powerful singing voice.

She remained closely connected to other Aboriginal survivors, including Truganini—often wrongly called “the last Tasmanian.” Truganini taught her bush skills. Together they fished, hunted, and gathered traditional foods and medicines.

Fanny converted to Methodism and, in a gesture both remarkable and heartbreaking, donated part of her land for a Methodist church that opened in 1901. An Aboriginal woman giving land for a settler church, on a continent stolen from her people.

After Truganini died in 1876, Fanny was officially recognized by the Tasmanian government as “the last full-blooded Tasmanian Aboriginal.”

That declaration triggered a grotesque debate. Scientists measured her skull. Scrutinized her hair. Argued over whether she was “full-blood” or “half-caste.” Racist pseudo-science could not accept that a capable, articulate woman could be fully Aboriginal.

Witness testimony, family accounts, and Fanny’s own words all confirmed her father was Nicermenic—not a European sealer. But prejudice refused to listen.

As she aged, Fanny understood something devastating: when she died, the songs and languages she carried would die with her. Not one language—but fragments of many, gathered from survivors she’d known as a child.

So she chose to preserve what she could.

She performed across Tasmania. In 1899, Horace Watson attended one of her concerts and recognized its historical importance. He arranged for her to record her voice using Thomas Edison’s wax-cylinder phonograph.

On August 5, 1899, at 65 years old, Fanny stood before the machine at the Royal Society of Tasmania and sang. She recorded again in 1903. Eight cylinders in total.

She spoke her name. She sang in English. She sang in Tasmanian Aboriginal languages no one else remembered. Melodies carried across thousands of years.

When she heard the playback, she wept.

“My poor race,” she said. “What have I done?”

Some accounts say she believed she was hearing her mother’s voice—her ancestors speaking back through the machine.

Fanny Cochrane Smith died on February 24, 1905, near Oyster Cove. She was seventy-one. Over four hundred people attended her funeral. She was buried secretly, to prevent the grave-robbing inflicted on so many Aboriginal remains.

Her recordings survived.

Those eight fragile cylinders became the only audio recordings of any Tasmanian Aboriginal language. The sole surviving sounds of cultures nearly erased.

For more than a century, linguists, historians, and her descendants safeguarded them. In 2017, they were added to the UNESCO Australian Memory of the World Register.

More importantly, they became the foundation for palawa kani—a revived Tasmanian Aboriginal language reconstructed using Fanny’s voice and early records.

Her descendants are now learning words she sang into a machine 125 years ago.

The language was not lost.

It was waiting.

Fanny’s declaration—“I’m the last of the Tasmanians”—turned out to be wrong.

She was not the end.

She was the bridge.

Many Tasmanian Aboriginal people today descend directly from her eleven children. The church built on her land is now a museum in her honor.

She was beaten for being Aboriginal. Questioned for being too accomplished. Told she represented extinction.

Instead, she ensured survival.

At 65, she sang into a machine and carried her people forward in sound.

Her voice remains—faint, crackling, undeniable—proving that even when colonization tries to erase a civilization, one woman’s courage to sing can preserve an entire world.